Russian mass-heater

So, this actually answers a question I had years and years ago about a Russian novel I was reading - or maybe it was a play - in which a character was "sleeping on the stove". My only experience with wood stoves was with the tin and cast iron kind that you most decidedly can't sleep on.

More and more I want to go visit the East of Europe. I think they know some things that the West and the stupid, indulged, lazy fat and boring 1st world have forgotten and forgotten to care about.

~

Also, finally identified the bird I heard the other night. Tawny owl. Probably the female.



From the trees behind the house last night. Not the first lower-pitched one, but the second, high screechy one. The idea is that the female and male of a given species have different calls, so they can locate each other. I know the sound carries a long way, since I've heard it across the fields too.

A friend who is a birder said you identify birds by learning their calls. Never been a big bird-person, but now I can get magpies, pheasants and blackbirds, as well as the very easily recognisable chirp of the parrot that lives in the bay tree who comes out in the spring. Not too many of course, but I get it now. Birding isn't about looking, it's about listening.



~

You don't have to live like they tell you: home-made log cabin edition

Lately can't seem to get enough of these outdoors, camping, bushcrafting, build-a-fort-in-the-woods videos. We admire people who know how to do things. I'm guessing this guy doesn't live here full time, but what a thing it would be to have a cool place like this to go to, that no one else knew about, that you'd built yourself and where you could be alone and free to make things and explore, read and hang out in peace. I guess it's an ancient instinct, and we see it in things like people who have allotments (vids of which I also like).

We just can't keep on living the way we do. It's not just killing us as individuals ("sitting down all the time is killing us") but destroying our entire civilisation. We're paying everything for sitting down all the time.


And it seems like a lot of other people think so too.



~

You don't have to live like they tell you: mountain hermit edition

Eremitical life is pretty strong in Italy. There are quite a lot of official, diocesan hermits and a whole bunch more unofficial, unrecognised, hidden "lay" hermits and semi-hermits.

This is a trend that is quite visible here, where Italians are still interested in the ancient things of the Faith. Mostly things they are emphatically NOT receiving from their parishes.



My rough translation:

TG2000: Alone among the immensity of the mountains, in the silence of creation, in a baita (mountain cabin) between rock and streams, Sr. Paola Biacino, lives like this on charity, after a marriage annulment and three daughters…

Suora Paola: Here you experience just that the holy spirit is something that goes beyond beyond us, that is, every word that comes out [from you] does not. It's never your perception. This is then reach for the other, reach for something bigger than myself.

So we are only instruments. We live and try to live in the time of God, not the time of man. It’s a seeking to live on the threshold of this experience and so it’s something beautiful.

TG 2000: We are under Monviso, the king of stone. The day of the hermit unfolds in the continuous conversation with God. As a Sister Paola another 300 in Italy witnesses that in the years of chaos the words, gestures, the eyes can write the days of God.

Every night she gets up at 3 am to pray and sing, then welcome those who come to look for hope.

Suora Paola: Try [search for] everything, look for someone that listens try to relearn praying. Try to understand why in a time of movement, solitude. [Why] a person seeks and chooses life of solitude and then look for a few. Sometimes they find and sometimes one [finds] stimulus to try even more.

TG 2000: The first day, 12 years ago, someone who knocked was a friar with lunch, and this brought tears of emotion.

Here's another:



Just watch it. Don't bother too much about the translations. (If you can follow a little Italian, it helps to click on the CC.)



~

A bowyer seems like a good thing to be

The tattoo on his arm says in Latin, "Do what you do."



~

You don't have to live like they tell you - Tirol edition

How to make butter.

I don't know more than about five words of German, but this looks pretty good to me.



~

Why do we work?

You don't have to live like they tell you.


I thought he made quite an important point. People don't want to quit mainstream city life because they fear they're going to be poor. But he said something quite interesting that will ring true for anyone who has lived - or tried to live - in a major modern city like London, New York, Toronto or Vancouver.

"I had a fairly normal life in London. Got up. Went to work. Socialized on the weekends. I felt like I didn't have enough time to do all the different things I wanted to do. The idea of working for like two-thirds of your life and having very little time tosocialize and do hobbies and things...it just doesn't sit right. All the bills, mortgages, electric, water, internet, TV licenses, insurances just... I don't know. I earned good money but everything just went. Everyone had their hand in my pocket until there was nothing left."

The only problem with that life - living to make money - was that he had to live in the city to do it. To make that money, just barely enough to sustain his life there cost him every penny he made. This meant that in effect he was living in order to keep working. How that differs from slavery is something that might be worth considering. If you make way less money, but have the ability to live on next to nothing, and live much better, how are you "poor"?

I make considerably less money now than I did in Toronto, and yet, I live a hundred times better and am ten thousand times happier. I think the sheer misery of life in the urban centre of Canada's financial capital was going to kill me if I stayed any longer. (Five years. And eleven in the gloomiest, darkest, wettest city in the world.) Even in terms of things I don't have to put up with. I don't have the hellish expense of maintaining a Toronto lifestyle, desperately struggling every month, from paycheque to paycheque, to get the bank balance up to the red line.

And I don't have to contend with the horrors of Toronto itself. I don't wake up every morning to the roar and screech of traffic; I don't have to commute on the GEEDEE Toronto Streetcars. I don't have to jam myself like a sweaty sardine onto the Toronto subway. (There are whole websites dedicated to how much everyone hates the TTC... don't get me started. It's like a damned post-apocalyptic dystopia on those things. Just thinking about it enough to have written those sentences is filling me with the old frustrated rage and existential despair...Dear God! The "short turn"... Oh, I'd managed to forget the Short Turn...)

Most important, I don't have to live with my soul turned down to the lowest possible level of sensitivity. That was probably the worst part: city life forces you to run your soul at the lowest possible level of consciousness. Why is city life so evil, so harmful, so corrosive to the human spirit? I think it's because in order to maintain it, you just have to shut down.

The essential meaninglessness of modern life, its circular, self-enclosed bubbleverse logic, is something that a lot of people are starting to think about: "I live (miserably) in the city so I can have a job so I can go on living in the city... miserably."

These questions: "How ought we to live?" are particularly piquant since so many of us of the post-Revolution generation never married and/or had children.

Meaning, purpose, authentic context, are huge issues for us. Many of the people raised by the Revolutionaries never went for the settled life at all, or found it extremely difficult to achieve, either practically or psychologically. Even when it wasn't financially out of reach (check out university tuition increases in the 2nd half of the 20th century, then compare it with the studies showing the real-world employability of university graduates ... it's some sobering stuff) it was often something we just couldn't conceive of for ourselves.

The two mental processes that are absolute requirements for accomplishment in life - curiosity and imagination - are precisely the two that absolutely must be shut off completely in an urban environment, simply to make it bearable.

This generation, and I think much of the generations that followed, really just doesn't have any confidence in the thing we've created that we call "normal life".  All the official revolutions since 1600 have been in different ways essentially anti-human. Since the Protestant/secularist Revolution, then the Industrial Revolution and then, after the horrors of the early 20th century, the Sexual Revolution, have combined one after the other to strip away the very core of those things that make us human.

I think it's significant that now a major focus for technology innovators, guys like Elon Musk and others less celebrated, is to figure out ways to make modern urban life less unbearable. But heavens! That seems like a pretty damn low bar to me. Less unbearable... Can't we hope for a little better than that?

~

Here's that hobbit house in real life, without the expensive BBC-level production values.


Still looks pretty good to me.


If page views are anything to go by, it seems like it looks pretty good to quite a lot of people.



~

Narrowboat hermitage

This is something not well known outside Britain. Narrowboats are obviously holdovers from when the canal system was the major way of moving goods around the country, from the late 18th century to the time of the trains.


They don't move goods anymore of course but the canals are all still there, and the boats too and if you want, you can traverse more or less the whole country this way.

At Manchester airport. First time we'd seen each other in 35 years. I knew him instantly from across the baggage room.

Having a nice tea in Chester.  I miss them both something terrible; and the whole mad clan.

My aunt and uncle, Gill and Mike, were big into them many years ago (I think they had their own), and have just recently gone back and got a nice boat-share for their hols.

The idea appealed to me immediately, and I spent a lot of time going down and admiring the boats, walking up and down the canal towpaths, that are lined with all good things like blackberries, elder and hazel. It's really one of the best things about Britain.

I imagine that if a person wanted to live a semi-eremitical life, this would be a good way to do it. You could mostly live by yourself but would really never be completely alone. As the chap here says, there's a close and friendly community ready made. Buying a boat is an expensive prospect of course, but its a great deal less than a house (housing prices in the UK are unbelievable. A perfectly ordinary middle class single-fam dwelling can easily go for 350,000 to half a million pounds.) Near Tattenhall there is a narrowboat moorage, and people pretty much set up house there permanently, with gardens and everything. Like a little narrowboat village.

Some day, if I ever get a yen to move back to the UK this might be the only way I'd think to do it.

You really don't have to live like they tell you. You really, really don't.



~

The Hermit Problem

All hermits tend to experience this; as soon as people hear about a hermit, they want to come and see him and ask what it's like.



~

You don't have to live like they tell you: dare to be "poor" on purpose

I'm thinking of building something like this out of scrap lumber and string. The garden doesn't have a lot of shade, and I can't afford a commercial pergola (though I did see a pretty nice one in Ikea last time we were there.)

Annamaria's been bugging me to buy the place. I always say the same thing, "Non c'e soldi." She always says, "Ma puoi ottenere finanziamenti." Then I say something lame like, "Non sono pronto per comprare una casa." And "Ho bisogno di un'altra stanza per gli ospiti." Then we start talking about the garden. I think she's trying to wear me down.

I moved in here a year and three days ago. The garden has grown into a huge deal. The more I do, the more raised beds, trellises, Hugelkultur berms and paths I build, the more ideas grow. And of course, I've known from the start that this is not something one can pack up and move. Last September when Anna rototilled the Big Dry Patch, I knew immediately that to really bring it back to life would be the project of at least a few years. It's progressed faster than I expected, but so have my plans and hopes for it. Ultimately, it's become a work of art, like a very, very slow painting, as well as an opportunity to learn more than I ever have before about gardening: the needs of various species of plants and soil management, and especially about my own abilities and limitations. The garden is a kind of living laboratory for me, and many of the experiments I've started there won't produce verifiable results for at least a few years.

I know the world tells you to live in a particular way, especially the world I left behind - that urban, car-oriented, stuff-oriented scrabble we have started thinking of as "normal life". A life in which the goal is all, and the process is to be shortened as much as possible. And the goal is just a thing. And then the next thing. And the thing after that, with no end in sight of the things we get because someone has told us we're supposed to have them. And the only way to live in that world is to shut your mind off, to build a huge interior wall between yourself and your awful surroundings. I lived in cities for 40 of my 52 years. It's going to be a while before I get that wall dismantled. (But the bricks are going to make great garden beds.)

For me, I think the garden is like a metaphor for an entirely different way of looking at life. It's not goal oriented. There's never going to be a day when I say, "Well, that's that done. Now I can go do something else." Anna's family has lived in this bit of Umbria for more than a century. On All Souls last year I went to the San Martino cemetery to pray for the dead, and I found her family's site. The dates and names went back to the 1860s. On my walks around the area I've run into her cousins who always stop and say hello. The property includes a bunch of farm land, and it's all worked by members of her family, various cousins. Her daughter is leasing a chunk of it for an orto. So I really do feel very much included by her generosity. None of her grown-up kids want to have it and they all seem happy enough for me to stay. I've never detected any of that kind of family jealousy.

Whether I would be able to manage the money to buy it, and whether it is the thing for the long term is another question. I've got a three-year lease, so we'll probably be thinking and talking about it until then at least. But for the moment, I'm getting it into my head that there is another way of thinking about life.

Anna and her family work the land here. Most of them also have day jobs elsewhere, but the land is the base, the foundation. She comes every day, winter and summer, to look after things. Nothing she does is hurried, everything is in its proper time in the annual cycle. She never worries when something happens. Last year I was disappointed when the little cherry tree on my patch died of black fly infestation. Her bigger tree got it too, but she just calmly cut the dead bits off, and now she's bought another tree and planted it. For the little one I sawed off the dead branches and kept the trunk as a trellis for sweet peas. That's how it goes. Life isn't goal-oriented, but process oriented. It's not aimed at a particular material outcome. You don't try to get some particular thing out of it, you just live it.

In fact, it's the whole rhythm of life in Italy that you see in the food. You can't buy broccoli in the summer or strawberries in January. Those things don't grow at those times, and if they were in the shops no one would buy them. Why would you want to eat broccoli in July anyway?

This way of living is one that humans have done for 10,000 years or so. And before that we had a vastly deeper well of time in which we simply took what came around. Who knows how long. Maybe 100,000 years. Compared to all that, the "normal" life of urban Vancouver or Toronto or London is something we've been doing for an eye-blink, and we're rapidly learning that it's horrible. It's destructive beyond description. The diseases of Modernia - our stress and obesity related illnesses, our depression and anxiety, our sitting-down malaise - are absolutely new. Our bodies can't adapt to this, which is saying something considering we are the world's champion adapters.

I suppose if I'd wanted to have a lot of money, I probably could have figured it out. A lot of the things I've wanted to know how to do I've figured out from book in the library. But what I saw was that you had to pay for your money and house and car with everything that was worth having in life. To pursue those things you had to say goodbye forever to all the things I already loved.

I think I was 22 when I figured out that the modern world didn't have anything I wanted. I spent a long time being very confused about life. And for a long time, seeing only this narrow range of possibilities, I felt trapped by it, as though I were already living in one of those dark dystopian sci fi worlds. But in the midst of that misery one thing I was completely sure about was that I didn't want that. The only thing I wanted then was to escape that.


I felt like the guy in 1984 or Brazil. Every one of those dystopian movies is about our own civilisation, and how it feels to live in it.


Every one of them is about some individual realising it's a horror and trying to figure a way out of it.




Office Space is about a guy who escapes his dystopia by learning not to want what it offers.


American Psycho is about what happens to a human being when it accomplishes the work of interiorising the modern urban dystopia. Don't be Christian Slater.

It is the unconscious assumption that we have to want what they tell us to want that keeps us trapped. Break out of that assumption, learn to want something else, something obtainable and inherently good, and you're free. When I hear about Japanese high school students jumping off buildings because they fail the university entrance exams, I always think, "Why not just want something else?"

I still struggle very much with my own brain. A lifetime of assumptions that life is awful and good things don't happen don't get broken over night, or even in a whole decade. I'm coming up on ten years in Italy. There's still a ton of things I haven't done (improved my Italian from "barely functional" to "conversational" high on that list). And with every item on my list of "Gee, I ought to do that" or "I'd really like to try that..." I still hear the chorus in my brain starting up, "Oh, you can't do that. You don't know how to do that sort of thing. You wouldn't be any good at that. You don't have any money. That wouldn't work. You've never done anything like that before... And anyway, people don't do that..." All followed with the worst of all, the sign nailed above the entrance to the nihilistic despair rabbit hole: "What's the point anyway?"

But with every new thing I do - starting, I suppose, with moving to and living in a weird foreign country that until I got here I strongly suspected was mythical - I chip away at the mental edifice of "You can't do that." I can now confidently say, "Well, I did all this other stuff, and that worked out pretty good."

I was raised in a kind of mental dystopia. The post-Christian culture - the post-traditional culture - is one of despair and hopelessness. I suspect that a lot of people live in it. I think that's why so many people can't accept Christ. The Good News is too good to be true. Good things don't happen, and things that good are just literally unimaginable.

Our mental maps for life start in Brazil's dystopia and move on to the post-apocalyptic wasteland of The Road. If you were raised in this, it's going to be the work of a lifetime to pull your mind out of it. I'd just like to let everyone know that it is actually possible to completely change your inner world.



~

You don't have to garden like they tell you

Here's an article by a guy who turned his front garden into a little wildflower paradise. He lives in one of those villages in England where everyone told him to pave over his front garden to create "extra parking". They literally think it's a good idea to pave paradise and put up a parking lot.

So many people see front gardens as a utility area. How many front gardens really are 'gardens' any more?

Drive through villages, towns and especially cities, and you will more than likely be greeted by row after row of paved over, gravelled over, or even tarmac covered unattractive car parks, resembling the complete opposite of a true garden.

Despite the fact that many of us now have several cars per household, meaning that extra space for a vehicle on the front comes in handy, we need to view front gardens as we used to; a space that is green and nice to look at, catches rainwater and boosts wildlife habitat in the places we live.

For five years, at my previous home, I jumped at the chance of creating a show piece wildlife garden at the front of the property, knowing full well how many heads it would turn in a village where people keep things 'neat and tidy'.

You don't have to live like they tell you. And you don't have to garden that way either.

I've been slowly - bucketful by bucketful - building raised flower and veg beds on the Big Dry Patch since the weather turned. The soil here is really heavy, sticky clay that has serious drainage and compaction issues, so each bed gets dug out, bordered by upright terracotta roofing tiles that we have a mountain of, and filled in with a combination of Annamaria's beautiful, black composted earth, a bit of the clay soil and buckets full of half-composted material from my own compost heap. Then they get planted it with various bibs and bobs as each one gets finished, then the whole thing sprinkled generously with white clover seed, and topped with leaf mulch. I've bought several tins of white clover as a ground cover to help inject some nitrogen into the soil and provide a "green manure" to till back into the soil in the spring.

I bought about 30 daffodil bulbs, since they're far and away my favourite flower. In the beds are red onions, little white spring onions and about 20 garlic plants, as well as a couple of little starter bedding plants of thyme (one regular and one lemon) and a lavender, and I moved my day lilies from the balcony into the bed where they can spread (but I liked them on the terrace outside the kitchen window so much I might have to go find some more). I'm happy to say that the cime di rapa, coriander and other brassicas I put in in September have laughed derisively at the attempts of the frosts to kill them.

But best of all, I've got a whole box full of various wildflower seeds I mostly collected on my stomps around Norcia. When the beds are ready all you have to do is sprinkle them on the surface and cover with leaf mulch. One of the abandoned farm houses (yes, it's a thing in Italy and there are lots of them) is surrounded by hollyhocks that were very prolific, so I've got several jars of these lovelies. Others are blue Nigella Damascena, white and red campion, sunflowers, poppies and wild chamomile and all manner of lovely things.

It's going to be a flowery spring.



~

"Nine children in this bed, and then she died there."

You don't have to live like they tell you.

This was fascinating, an ancient way of living that died - perhaps appropriately - only in 1965. The man doing this restoration is only a single generation away from a way of life that is thousands of years old, as though the great vast ocean of the past - that for most of us is a long lost memory - is lapping right at his very heels.

Did you notice the picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall? I had no idea Icelanders were Catholics. I would have thought that being essentially offshoots of Norway they would have been lapsed Lutherans.

We don't know how much we have lost until we take a close look at how people lived in the past. This Icelandic homestead was an extension of the way Norwegians and many northern people lived for thousands of years. Possibly since the ice first receded from Europe. We look at the idea of ten or fifteen people all living in essentially one room together and think only of ourselves, our privacy that would vanish, our sense of self, even our personal identity.

We wouldn't last a week in a situation like that. But for them it was natural. It was how you were supposed to live and if they were alone, as we all are, they would have gone mad with loneliness and a loss of the identity that way of life gave them.

But I think while we no longer know this life, even in the reduced form it took in the Anglo nations since the Industrial Revolution, we have a kind of visceral memory of it. Perhaps a cultural memory. It's why at this time of year we all try so frantically to reproduce it in some way, buying turkeys and trying to get what's left of our atomised families to come and eat it, or even our friends to come and play the role of family-replacements.

We are alone and scattered and most of us - even older people - remember no other way of living. But it's still there because we know on some level that this way is not natural to us. That it must be restored somehow or we will simply die out, either culturally or physically.



~

Making choices

You don't have to live like they tell you.






I was in the SCA for 20 years. I grew up in it, starting from age 11. And I can tell you, these people are not alone by any means. There are lots and lots of people who - while they might not want to get rid of their phones or fridges, really aren't that happy with how Modernia works. There's this thing in the SCA that people talk about but rarely do: "living the dream", which means doing the SCA thing full time. Re-enactors are a funny bunch, and not all alike, but we've all got this bee in our bonnets, that things didn't go quite the way they should have, that people may be more comfortable now but something essential has been taken away from them.



~

A house in the country

You don't have to live like they tell you.


I like Wales. It's close to the Fam.

Maybe these nice hippies in Wales wouldn't mind a little Gregorian Chant or a little chapel...

(I wonder if you can do a vaulted ceiling and pointed arches in straw bales.)


I grew some wonderful squashes this summer. And I did the same thing, go out to the patch and give it a little encouraging pat and a pep talk.


It sort of seems like Wales is a place to live if you don't want to live like they tell you.



~

Nettle beer and boozy cherries

Just sent the following email to Fr. Prior in Norcia:

It all came to about 25 litres, in all sizes of bottle. Need more bottles!
A bit disappointed by the colour. I was hoping for a nice dark green. 

"Dear brewmonks,

I couldn't have done it without y'all. If he's off the innernets, please tell Br. Augustine that I took all the advice I could remember, and that I used the hops I collected and dried last summer in Norcia. They are still very fragrant, and nice. (And that a walk along the ferrovia will reveal that the stuff just grows like wild-crazy all over the area, so go get some!) About a pound and a half of fresh nettles came from the big patch in the garden.

I couldn't find any beer yeast in the village shops, so I used this thing, "lieveto madre" that I think is the equivalent of our sourdough starter, but it said on the packet that it was made from beer yeast, so I figured what the heck. It smelled a bit like pizza at first, but soon smelled nice and beery. It sat in the big bucket for a week, until, as per instructions, it had mostly stopped its mighty fizzing, but I could see it was still active. Tasted like beer too. Into each bottle I put a few little pieces of this super-strong fresh organic ginger we've got around here, and I mixed up a little more yeast with some honey and spooned it into each bottle.

Bottled it up last night, about 25 litres worth, I think. (All the bottles were different sizes, so I don't really know.)

Also, the rosehip wine that I made last May with the last bits of the monk-beer yeast has turned out beautifully. It's quite tart because rosehips are incredibly acidic, but its really refreshing and got quite fizzy, and rather alcoholic. No more than two glasses for me! But the work involved in picking, boiling, mashing, straining (3 times) through cheesecloth made the 7 litres I got not really a good investment. I'll stick to making them into jelly."

~

Boozy cherries, stewing away. 

Pity I missed elderflower season. Last year's elderflower champagne (using yeast the brewmonks gave me left over from their operation) turned out gloriously, and I did up about ten litres of non-alcoholic elderflower cordial and kept it in the freezer all summer. But the nettle beer took every bottle I had.

But we'll have elderberries by mid-July, and I can make some more elderberry cordial. The last batch I did was ages ago in England, and I followed a medieval recipe that called for cloves (it was a medicinal thing - medieval cough and cold remedy) but I didn't care for the cloves and I think I'll leave them out this time.

Clearly need more bottles.

The recipe for the boozy cherries is kind of complex and tricky, but I encourage everyone to give it a go. Nothing like lovely cherry cocktails, warmed up with about a half teaspoon of honey, in the cold weather.

Take:

a kilo of fresh, ripe local cherries
two litres of el-cheapo vodka
two large preferably hinge-top jars

Wash the jars. Rinse the cherries under a cold tap. Put them in the jar.

Now, here's the tricky bit: pour the vodka into the jars over the cherries. Stick on the lids.

You may be tempted to experiment and stick on the lids before you pour the vodka, but I'd recommend against it.

Put the jars somewhere out of the way for six months.

Share and enjoy.

(I've tried it both with and without a little simple sugar syrup, and I find I prefer it without. If you want it sweet, the honey can be added in when you drink the cherry juice.)



(I'll spare you the ten-hour version)

I'm also digging like a dwarf in the garden. The big patch that's exclusively mine to play with is really just a huge patch of bare earth. A complete blank slate. It's got about ten small fruit and ornamental trees in it, but needs to have the soil improved and get some ground cover plants in there. The soil here is river silt, which means it's pretty dense clay and sticky, but extremely fertile. But if it's left bare it gets very dry and packed down. I have yet to figure out why the extremely lush grass in the orchard just stops abruptly at that line.

I'm digging big round raised beds around each tree, using the length of my big spade to measure the diameter, with the tree as the centre point. These I'm ringing with some big, weathered and mossy squared masonry stones that are piled up along the fence. I'd also like to try my hand at making some wattled fences. There are bundles of cut twigs from trimming the fruit trees just lying about, and apparently not being used for anything. They belong to my neighbour, but I'm sure he won't mind me taking them off his hands. Like any farm, there is loads of unused spare stuff lying around.

I know it's way too late in the season, but I'm working like mad on this book and if I don't have something physical to do my brain will melt. And really I don't think I've found anything that gets the cobwebs out of your brain quicker than taking huge, round overhead swings at the earth with a big iron mattock! (And I'm losing all that podge I put on by sitting around on the sofa in Santa Marinella, sulking for six months.) I'm just levering up the big clods, hacking them into smaller clods, and then watering the soil to soften it up. Then I loaded a big thick layer of cut grass over it to keep the moisture in. It seems to be working. Next, when the whole ring is finished, a layer of soil goes on top of the grass cuttings, and I keep it covered and keep watering it.

I'm just going to seed it, I think. I've got a load of wildflower seeds I collected in Norcia, and a bunch more in packets. We have a sort of second spring in September when the temperature drops and the rain comes back, so a lot of the wildflowers and plants that can't take the heat and dry weather spring back up, so maybe we'll see a blooming. If not, we can wait. Gardening is really all about patience and long-term planning.


Country life. It's the only life worth living.



~

Strength and virtue - a good place to start again

DAY-um!

I knew I sort of liked this guy. (And no, not for the obvious reasons.)


He's actually a lot like many of the people I grew up around. In the 70s, the hippie movement on the West Coast hadn't morphed into the solipsistic leftist political stuff it is today, and there was room in it for genuine masculinity, and the general gist of rejecting the Modernian lies about how we are supposed to live was still there.

I wish we could do something to make these kinds of people Catholic. We could do with some of this. It's not entirely gone, that old virile, pagan, filial piety, virtue. The kind that was Christianized in the early centuries and went on to build an entire civilization.

Yesterday Annamaria was telling me what sort of fertilizers to put on the tomatoes, and we were in the big garage under my flat where they keep all their contadini stuff. She pointed to a big round basket-y kind of thing hanging on the wall and asked if I knew what it was. In fact, there were two, hanging up together, one made of a big round wooden frame with one side closed in with metal mesh, about 5 feet in diameter; the other smaller made of wicker, looking like giant flour sieves. I said no, and she said, "My father the contadino used it when I was growing up." Then I realized.


I'd seen it on television and in the movies; it was for winnowing grain by hand, a winnowing fan.

You put the grain in the baskety thing, and on a breezy day, you toss it up in the air, and allow the wind to carry away the chaff while you catch the grain again, to throw it all up again, and again. People had been using them since the agricultural revolution began.

One generation away. Annamaria is probably old enough to be my mother, maybe in her early 70s. She dug out five rows of ground, three for her and two for me, to plant our tomatoes, zucchini, beans, peppers and melanzane. The rows are about ten meters long, and she did it by hand with a long handled iron mattock, a job I could not possibly have done myself.

They've given me a huge patch of land to do whatever I want with, and I'm a little overwhelmed. Frankly, I haven't been terribly strong, physically, since chemo, and after 15 years of sitting down to work, but I remember when I was 19 or so, redoing an entire garden alone one spring. A little house I'd rented with some friends hadn't been seen to in a couple of decades, and I took to it like a duck who'd never seen water before.

I rented an electric trimmer, and cut and pruned, and trimmed and dug and turned over beds that hadn't been dug in a long time. I found the old compost bed that someone had dumped an entire sack of potatoes into some time in the past and that had therefore become the potato bed, and produced the best potatoes I'd ever eaten before or since. I did carrots and beets and broccoli. I cut back the wilderness of Himalayan blackberries that had grown to fifteen feet deep, and of course - being roses - they loved the pruning so much they produced an enormous summer crop of berries. Someone had planted climbing white roses right next to the hedge and they had grown right into it, so when I trimmed the hedge I also pruned the roses, which then sprouted huge white blossoms all along its length. The pink clematis had turned into a huge tangled wall and I cut it down into an arch that became a mass of flowers in the summer.

That spring and summer in that little garden - that we lost again the following winter when the landlady sold the property to developers - will stand in my mind as one of the happiest periods of my life. I remember it in a kind of pink and green and golden glow. I'm not 19 anymore, but maybe we can do something like it again.

I've been here three weeks and it's been busybusybusy, so it only occurred to me the other day that there's a good chance here, perhaps even better than in Norcia (where flat land is hard to come by). Unlike the city, where rotting, corrupt Modernia is still reigning supreme in the last days of its wicked glory, here, only a few miles away, a much older kind of life is still lived, and remembered. I think Annamaria likes me because I so obviously value it, and so clearly want to live it myself (I think her daughter wasn't that interested). Even though our ability co communicate the details is still a bit limited, we've become friends because we both discovered a similar kind of soul, the same sort of priorities.


I've mostly finished organising the house. The books are all out of their boxes and arranged in the cases, and the oratory is set up. I sang Compline in it on Sunday night. The only thing that's missing now is someone to share it all with.

A bit of what will be the flower garden, with the oldest fig tree I've yet seen.

But I'm also happily anticipating the arrival of a friend from the US. (Note to self; order sofa-bed from Ikea.) She's a young lady who found that her ordinary life - with good, morally praiseworthy work, good, believing friends, a large and loving Catholic family - wasn't enough. She is thinking thoughts of bigger things, as you do, and her spiritual director suggested she come to Europe.

Annamaria's doves. In the big shed behind it are chickens and rabbits.

So I invited her to come to think them here, to stay and use my place as a home base to look for answers to her vocational yearnings, (there's no more centrally located place in Italy than Perugia.) and meanwhile, eat a lot of good Umbrian food and drink a lot of tea. There are monasteries on the continent where the Faith is preserved, though not many. And there are plenty of other things going on. She says it's a funny sort of urge, to leave where she is and come to Europe to look for something. How well I know that urge! Say a prayer that we can help her find what she's looking for. She will come in September.

San Fortunato, the church on the hill behind the house. 

Annamaria's chair in the orto, where she has a rest and a smoke and can just sit and look at the view.

Last night I went down to the bottom of the garden with a pair of kitchen scissors and cut the remaining wild chamomile to start drying. It grows very abundantly all over the place here, usually twined up together with the brilliant scarlet poppies that are just coming into bloom now in the fields and along the edges of the roads.

Her patch, and mine on the top right, which we planted the other night. 

The other night I took a bit of a stroll around as the sun was going down and the opening chords of our next stormfront was starting to really blow, and stood watching three kestrels wheeling and spinning and riding the wind like acrobats.

This weekend, I'm going to start building my flower beds, and I've got a bucket of seed packets and jars of wild seeds I'd collected from Norcia. We're a bit late in the season to start seeds but I don't mind.

The growing season here is very long. Who knows what we can grow here, given enough time.



~

Electricity: that's when all the trouble started...

You don't have to live like they tell you.

What's going to happen if you break all the rules and want something the world tells you is dumb or not worth having?

"But people will think I'm weird."

Honey, too late.



~

Home cookin

A few weeks ago, I ran out of gas in my gas bombola. It's kind of an Italian thing t have a gas canister in your kitchen instead of having your stove hooked up to the mains. When you run out, you go down to the farm shop and get a new one, the guy picks up the old one and refills it for the next customer.

But for some reason, I just couldn't be bothered. I've got quite a good microwave and of course, it's Umbria so I have a large old fashioned fireplace with cooking stuff. This is also perfectly normal for Umbria. I've learned how to be very efficient about keeping hot coals going all the time on the big flat stone hearth, and it's kind of fun to do the morning coffee on the fire as you sit and say your morning prayers or think your morning thoughts. Even in summer the early mornings here are cool, and it's been raining and miserable for weeks, so it's doubly nice.

Lately, I've been thinking that for the summer I'll just get a big marquee and move the cooking to the big brick barbeque thing in the garden, and have an outdoor kitchen, like we used to have in the SCA. Why not?

Last night, I was doing up some curry stir fry and risotto on the fire, and reading some stuff on my laptop, and thought, again, "You don't have to live like they tell you."

Here's an article about doing things differently.


~

Passport to Pimlico

In 1977, squatters in Freston Road, Notting Hill declared independence from the British state. Facing eviction by the Greater London Council (GLC), the community figured the best way to evade the constraints imposed on them was to just free themselves of those constraints altogether. So they lobbied the UN and established a 1.8-acre microstate - "The Free and Independent Republic of Frestonia" - complete with its own postage stamps, visas and passports.

If the same thing happened today (which it probably wouldn't, because squatting residential buildings is now something you can go to jail for), police would likely move in with eviction papers and battering rams. But back then, living in abandoned buildings apparently wasn't seen as the abhorrent transgression we now know it to be.

This story about the Notting Hill squatters in London in the 70s, coincides precisely with the story of a good friend of mine who became a famous journalist in Canada after a life of many adventures, wandering about the world. He dropped out of high school in Ontario and worked his way across the Atlantic in some grubby capacity on a commercial vessel. Then, more or less penniless, he fetched up in London where he occupied a squat, an unoccupied council house with no electricity. There he lived happily for four years surrounded by fellow societal misfits of various political and philosophical stripes.

He earned what money he had by buying and selling antique books, which he knew a little about, and spent a couple of quid a month purchasing a monthly subscription to the British Library where, he said, he had a crush on the beautiful librarian in the classics section. So beautiful and charming was she, that he followed her reading advice assiduously and thereby gained a thorough education in Classical literature, including picking up a little Greek and Latin.

He said the only contact he ever had with the forces of officialdom was when he was signed up against his will for the NHS. To correct this potentially disastrous infiltration of The Man into his idyllic life, he went to see his assigned "worker" and finally convinced him to burn his file, rendering him once again safely anonymous.

Alas, it was not to last. Britain has since become an almost parodic police state wherein the law-abiding, corduroy and flat-cap-wearing citizens live in terror of saying or thinking the wrong thing out loud on the underground, and violent psychotics wander the streets assaulting and murdering with impunity. But the late 1970s was only the start of all that.

My friend knew that the time of freedom was coming to an end when the city decided that everyone living free in the squats had to be "regularized" and made officially resident in their council houses, given numbers and assigned social workers, entered into the NHS rolls and forcibly inserted into the shiny new socialist system.

He sighed with sadness at the sight of all his hippie friends being herded into the workers' paradise. But he left, knowing that the forces of history were sweeping everyone into this sticky net and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

After a circuitous route that included a brief stint washing dishes and sleeping on the beach in an African nation that is now a seething mass of violence, he ended up in Thailand, where those forces would take a while to create their baleful results. He took a job as the ladies social columnist for the Bangkok times, and lived happily for some years in the little colony of ex-pat Anglos who had been left in the Far East, like debris on a beach at low tide, after the demise of the British Empire.

Freedom is getting harder and harder to achieve. Few are they who still even remember what it was.



~

Dream home

I'll have this one.

It was built by Paulina Wojciechowska, a Polish architect living in the UK who gives workshops in natural building techniques in Poland.

She and her natural building buddies have a Natural Building foundation sort of thing in Britain, and also give workshops in Spain.

Straw Bale workshop near Gatwick airport, (believe it or not)

This workshop is a wonderful opportunity to gain hands-on experience of constructing and plastering a real straw bale building that will be used for visitor accommodation.

The straw bale workshop will be held in a lovely farm set in rolling english countryside 15 minutes drive from London Gatwick airport. Paulina has designed a dream home which will be built from natural materials at the workshop site of Oaklands Farm over the next two years.
What You Will Learn

Hands-on experience of all the stages in straw bale wall construction, and an introduction to the plastering of a real structure:

Straw Bale Workshop UK (5 days)

-Raising straw bale walls
-How to tie the straw bale walls together
-Making a wall plate and compressing a wall
-Installation of door and window frames
-Managing the use of bales to maintain wall strength
-Recognizing the clay found on our land and understanding how to use it for building
-Preparation and application of the first 2 coats of clay plaster onto the straw bale wall

And another "Planning your dream natural building home" that involves all the down-to-earth stuff like

Choosing your site
Preparation of a site plan
Dealing with the site’s characteristics such as earth types, ground topology, etc.
Creating a house design to suite your lifestyle
The balance of costs: money, time, quality.
How to find your balance point and cost your project in a realistic way
Working with architects, builders and volunteers
Fitting the project into your life.
A design example: the amazing 5 bedroom house being built at Oaklands Farm.

Technologies choices for the house structure:

Foundations: types of foundations, pros and cons, which to use in different site situations, relative costs and effort involved.
Roof structures: types of roofs, pros and cons, how to choose the best roof structure for your project, relative costs and effort involved.
Insulation: a discussion of different solutions and their relative effectiveness.
Walls: an overview of natural building wall technologies: straw bale, cordwood, earthbag, cobb, rammed earth, old tyres.
Floors: an overview of the different technologies, their pros and cons.
Guidelines for designing wall structures using different technologies
Balancing your idealogical ideas with your building inspector’s logical, legal ones.
Hands-on experience: building walls for the Oaklands Farm project from cordwood, earthbag and cobb.

An overview of planning and installing services, with an emphasis on specific considerations for houses built from natural materials:

Electrical systems
Plumbing systems
Heating systems.
Waste water drainage systems
Rainwater drainage systems
Internal shelving and structures.

~

I do rather wish that this whole thing weren't so inordinately tied up with silly hippie pseudo-spirituality... "Earthmother Dwelling: Listening to the elements, exploring inner freedom"..."earth mother"... Srsly?

"In my ‘Earthmother Dwelling’ that I built at Cal-Earth, these are some of the things that I aimed to achieve. The ‘Earthmother Dwelling’ was built in a close dialogue with the essence of the site. Listening to the elements, letting the earth tell me what it wanted to become. Being from the architectural icons of traditional cultures. Listening openly to my inner voices, letting them guide me to achieve coherence and happiness."

...

Um...Yeah, ok. Whatever.

But I don't suppose that you'll necessarily catch a case of Hippie-dum if you live in a straw bale house you've built yourself. And just imagine going to one of these workshops and being the only nice, friendly Trad Catholic these people ever meet. I find that with these kinds of hippies, they tend to be more innocent than mean about beliefs, and more open-minded than you might at first think. Sing the Divine Office in Latin and Gregorian three times a day in your off hours and see what they do. Might be an interesting experiment.

And it's pretty easy to get behind other aspects of the... err... philosophy (I suppose you could call it):

At the moment, my ideal house is one which lives in such harmony with its environment, a house that is difficult to notice, like an animal that blends into its surroundings. So many houses appear like warts on our landscape.

Though you wouldn't know it from all the (ahem) sharing I do online, I am actually pretty keen on that idea of Philip Neri's: "Amare nescire," to "Love to be unknown."




~

Doing it different

This was one of the first alt-farming videos I saw demonstrating that there is a movement to change things substantially.

One of the big issues, as this person says, is knocking the global addiction to fossil fuels. Right now the world's food supply is totally dependent upon oil. But whether you believe in Peak Oil or not, this is an enormous problem.

And something that is probably too politically incorrect for the BBC to mention, kicking the world's fossil fuel habit would also render the threat of Islam null. Right now, the only reason the Mad Mullahs have become a resurgent threat is the oil money buying the bullets and bombs.



~